About
“There are two Jodys. Known and unknown. Word and sound. Shape and process. Id and ego. Both these Jodys weave in and out of each other, shaping, caressing, finessing a formal and epistemological pluralism that delights and penetrates both in juxtaposition and contradistinction. Jody speaks, sculpts, installs, performs and paints. And the commonality that runs through all these diverse pursuits is her intention to capture, isolate and amplify that very diversity, and all the paradoxes that come with being a spoken word artist who paints or a sculptor who performs. Connections abound across the widest possible plains and planes of creativity in the inventive art of Jody DeSchutter.
I like the feel of her sculpture; the rhythm and metre of her intonation; the gravity of her performance; the fleshiness of her painting.
SCULPTURE
INTONATION
PERFORMANCE
FLESHINESS
FEEL
GRAVITY
PAINTING
RHYTHM
Each adjective works with each discipline. Each practice ignites the same mood and feelings in her viewer or audience. A brushstroke becomes a spoken word; a wooden veneer becomes a stoic performance. Everything sort of dovetails together so neatly, so effortlessly in Jody’s practice. Round balls fit square holes. And all she needs to do is push gently. With her brush.
You can see all of this consanguinity in a simple little painting. Performing ways of becoming (2019) sees a Jacob’s Ladder of hands extend up Jody’s canvas, set against a chiselled background of scratched blacks and hatched greys. Hands, like eyes, never lie. They have personalities of their own. Jody’s hands meditate, bless, snap and implore all at once, dancing in and out of passion, compassion, impression and expression. It is a delightful, beautifully executed painting of a notoriously difficult subject to paint, but it sings not because it has been deftly done. It sings because it is a solo performance in a much grander score of imagination and achievement.
Painting as performance as sculpture as poem as painting as … You spin me right round, baby, right round … round the mulberry bush.”
-An excerpt from an essay by Matthew Carey Williams on Cease Producing Stimuli
Photo by Matt Favero @liminalwarp
Statement
My work traverses the endless feedback loops comprised of observation, perception, experience, and environment, and how they shape (and are shaped by) our personal and collective reality.
I have been particularly enamored by the quantum mechanical and the religious: their looping orbits sustain epiphany, confusion, void, and back again. Each representing vastly different and simultaneously similar approaches to the unknown. Each proposing ways of making the invisible visible; they are embodiments of the unknown.
Douglas Hofstadter refers to us conscious individuals as “little miracles of self-reference”. Perhaps by fully embracing the strange loops, reflections, translations, paradoxes, and uncertainties, we can illuminate connections rather than divisions; promoting alliances between seemingly opposite or incongruent ways of being.
DeSchutter received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria, Canada in 2016 and now lives and works in London, UK. Her work spans and intersects painting, spoken word, poetry, sound, installation, and performance.